So, you, are explaining that to me, as a person of intelligence, and you know that you have intelligence because people taught you that, and you went out in the world with your taught understanding of intelligence and the world proved to you over and over you have merit, so you suggest what intelligence is....

When ever I ask someone about this, nobody ever says 'I can't answer because I don't know intelligence'...we are all taught, based on school systems etc. what intelligence is...therefore I am intelligent, so then I can comment..

Sure*, we can't be sure** but we can be pretty sure*.


**cartesian doubt
*reasonable doubt

says the intelligent man who based his intelligence on his intelligence (not you...man in general)

What does that even mean? I understand you think there's some problem of circularity here (said so in my first post itt) but you're not doing a good job explaining what it is. I suspect it's some variation of deep scepticism. How can we even know?

We have iq tests in this world that decide the smartest people, some that suggest di vinci, tesla, godel, einstein, hawkings whoever are among the brightest minds ever. So the test is developed by people of lesser intelligence....

shouldn't di vinci be the one to tell us whos smart? or einstein? or hawkins....

but thats silly too because we only see these people as smart based on definitions created by people who are self admitted less intelligent than the people they say are smartest.

I think of intelligence as some kind of raw information-processing potential, probably best expressed as conceptual facility and awareness, cognitive efficiency, analytic ability, etc.

At some point the "endgame" of intelligence probably involves optimizing for desired results, so it seems like a safe assumption that success at achieving desired results correlates with intelligence when we control for all non-intellectual factors.

IQ seems to correlate well with, for example, financial success and academic success even when we control for other big influences like socioeconomic status, so it seems like as good a metric as we have at the moment.

I know you didn't try to state it as fact so we can say its just opinion...but if instead we tried to say your opinion is fact...have you stopped to think first if you are intelligent enough to define it....because we can't define something by starting with the assumption we are that thing that we don't yet know the definition of.

But there is an assumption in all of us, especially because we attended school, that all or most of us have at least enough intelligence to comment on what intelligence is

Do you find that weird that your definition correlates with getting good grades in school.

And that a Buddhist master (im not buddhist ;p) might laugh at you for your silly suggestion that achievement desires has any bearing on a mans intelligence. Some would suggest its the opposite, that not striving for achievement is intelligence.

That says that someone outside economy and academics can't have intelligence...I'd guess you don't think thats true....but your definition is right in line with our culture of go to school and get a job.....

What if Donald trump, or Bill Gates could not run their families correctly....are they still intelligent?

The other one I get all the time is Hitler was a genius....but the people who tell me this are not genius's...Hitler was smart in some ways, but he didn't win, he was evil, and he was power hungry and out of control......these are of course my opinion but examples of how I think intelligence is misunderstood.

Couldn't be bothered reading this silly thread entirely. Yes, the validity of IQ is very questionable and really only measures academia based intelligence and is culturally biased. Yes, no one has been smart enough to develop a better means of measuring intelligence. Yes, the average person is horrible at assessing intelligence, but they doesn't mean much, the average person is horrible dealing with anything abstract. Yes, I'm basing their assessment on a "what is intelligence" paradigm that can't really be tested; if intelligence is anything like the "strongest player" in game theory terms it'd be based on who makes the least amount of mistakes, but that doesn't take into consideration innovation, but intelligence tests can't do that either; if you look at how a intelligence test would operate, of course it wouldn't be able to measure innovation because that goes against exactly what innovation is, thinking outside the box basically, thinking outside anything a IQ test can measure.

Intelligence ultimately is a umbrella term, with it's components being unclear and varying massively between people. Psychologists can't even accept a single definition of it, and I think that's more a insight on the silliness of such a term; what's the function of having such a word without having some sort of end-game for it? Sure Buddhist masters might laugh at achievement, but they're merely laughing at how westerns use the word, as more of a productivity thing, they'd still have ideas of achievement but perhaps it's more to do with reducing suffering for themselves and others.

I think madnak's definition of it is the most solid, if he factors in that there's multiple intelligences as well. Sure it doesn't fit the context of how people use the word, but they're smelly and misuse it imo.


And even though it can't be measured precisely, that doesn't mean the more obvious cases can't be deduced who's most intelligent; calculating it only really helps for book keeping and to be precise, I could deduce who's the most intelligent out of a baby and a adult, for the most part, with pretty good precision. Comparing two adults is something else but.

Thx and you don't have to read the whole thread, you get the idea...and im glad someone gets it more than the others so far....most of what you said is along the same lines of what im saying

but this part is 100 percent untrue....it seems like you can say who has obvious intelligence but again thats because we feel we are at least smart enough to make these distinctions....but thats only true if we are intelligent...and we aren't able to define that.

Another example like yours would be to say surely Hawkins or Einsten is at least somewhat intelligent...but we can't say that either...we have no basis.

One problem with discussing abstract ideas is it ultimately comes down to a semantic debate. You say, "this is wrong because of x" and I say, "no, it's right because x=y+z and not x=y+v" It's all rather tedious tbh, ultimately a limitation of communication.

You seem to be defining intelligence in a binary manner, they're either it or not, and if they're not that means nothing they can produce is credible and if they are, everything they say is credible, whereas I'm defining it more as a scalar thing, with people lower on the spectrum more likely to make mistakes than those higher up(yes mistake is very hard to define when there's not a clear end-game)

The thing is with words, none of them can be really well defined. There's always some sort of object that doesn't fit in with the framework. Try to define something, and than think of an exception to the word, it's really hard btw. Try defining what a table is, and than think of a type of table that doesn't fit your definition. Remarkably though, even with it basically being impossible to flawlessly define stuff, people are really good at knowing what they're trying to define. The same goes with intelligence. If you take the word from a literal sense, it's rather smelly. However, if you take it from the perspective of the person who is using it, it isn't so. Definitions aren't absolute, at least in English, their static, and to say, "no you're wrong because your definition is wrong" shows a lack of understanding of English.

Myself, being a adult who is bit of a conscious, logical thinker, and has been conditioned to western thought, finds babies to be quite stupid. Yes, intelligence can't be precisely defined, but going by my paradigm, they are. If we had a disagreement about something and it came down to our internal definitions of a word conflicts, then it'd be intelligent(irony =D) to attempt to define it to make communication possible. If you're defining intelligence as happy monkeys that run of cliffs, than I'd need to use intelligence in that context. I find such a definition ridiculous but so I wouldn't use it afterwards, but during the discussion I'd need to.

"But it can't be defined well at all!" I hear you say. That's why when any deepish conservation is being used, it's typically a good idea to use more specific language rather than umbrella terms that could refer to a million different things.

It can't "be fact," intelligence is just a word.

I'm smart enough to predict the circumstances under which I'm likely to use the word "intelligence," and my intended meaning when I use that word.

Not at all. I assume that most children would prefer to get good grades in school, and that those who are best at securing the outcomes that they desire will therefore tend to have better grades than average.

Some people certainly define "intelligence" differently from how I define it.

It suggests that many people want to perform well academically and financially, generally including those who do in fact perform well academically and financially, and it assumes that academic and financial performance are somewhat responsive to intelligence. It doesn't suggest that someone who is not academically or financially successful is necessarily unintelligent, only that people who never have academic or financial goals are in the minority.

That depends on context. I don't know enough about Bill Gates or Donald Trump to really say much about them (Gates seems pretty smart to me from what I do know, Trump I'm not so sure about).

IQ has extremely low predictive power, except for when you are looking at the low outliers.

Obviously it has a correlation with academic success. The tests were designed to identify students who are not suited to academics (which is why the tests include "what would you do if you found a wallet on the street?", attention tasks, and submissive personality questions).

The tests are barely not pure achievement tests.

wtf submissive personality questions and how they react to finding a wallet? Seriously? blah. Is this outdated or still the norm?

what happened to your old account btw?

You say things like this as if it's obvious that only the most intelligent people should be able to decide how intelligent other people are. Until you get over this hump that you created for yourself out of nowhere, this thread isn't going to move anywhere. It's getting quite annoying that you aren't explaining yourself at all, but you're so sure you're completely correct.

The tests are designed to identify kids who will do poorly in school.

Not knowing how you are "supposed" to act is predictive of poor school performance.

Schooling does its best work for the kids who are really good at listenning to authority figures. That is why valedictorian means "comfortably middle class" instead of "rich as ****."

The kids who are actually really smart (not as assigned by IQ tests) do much better than those with a high IQ. High IQ means that you are a very bright chump who really likes following.

I change email accounts from time to time. Can't remember / probably don't have access to whatever email address I had when I signed up.